Wednesday, 23 July 2014

This was a piece I wrote for the Dark Mountain Project about a year
or so back. It’s been hanging around gathering computer dust amongst
other lost projects, so as it’s been a while since I’ve written anything
for the site, I decided to post it here. The piece is long. I know this
is unfashionable these days, but it is what it is.

It is ultimately a semi-creative piece as much inspired by Shamanic
and Animist thought and practices as it is by Buddhist thought that
seeks to honour some of the ideas and themes over at the Dark Mountain
Project set up by the author and ex-journalist Paul Kingsnorth and
Douglas Hine. If you want to know more about them, click here.

In the future, we may all end up being wannabe shamans and
buddhas, striving to re-invoke the sacred after so much meaning and
identity is lost during the slow dissipation of the elaborate human made
world we once knew. We will remember scraps of practices and rituals,
pasting them together in scrapbook form in an attempt to re-invoke our
feeling-selves that have been severed from the brush, seasons and
landscapes that our parents spoke of as the once normal. In our
attempts, we will merge with rivers & streams, swimming amongst
plastic wrappers and murky twists and turns, searching for some sense of
purity amongst the lost innocence, our species no longer capable of
dreaming itself in and out of the Earth’s breast, our gifted past tossed
away by short-sightedness, solipsism, and species-centric arrogance.
Some will stare breathless & frozen, whilst others will get on with
the business of adjusting to what is immediate; some of these folk will
be awake.

In Animism, empathy is king, whilst in Buddhism, compassion rules. Is
it possible to embrace the depths of our collective darker ways and
merge with their results without breaking in two? That is, are we able
to tenderly immerse ourselves in the damaged landscapes that surround us
and breathe with them as they are, and not as we imagine them to be?
This is the spiritual and emotional challenge that twirls around the
Dark Mountain. Environmentalists know the pain of opening to the
seemingly bottomless sadness that faces anyone willing to sober up and
look into the heart of our impact on the myriad animate and inanimate
species that surround us. Delicate selves are usually not sturdy enough
to withstand the dark sobering wind that rips through the heart and at
innocence cocooned within idealistic cotton. What then is to be done?
For surely the Dark Mountain is at heart a wake-up call, a sobering
invitation to see the world as it is, and choose a response, rather than
simply react. This type of call is not unfamiliar to certain forms of
Buddhism, which has the recognition of suffering, often redefined as
dissatisfaction or angst, at its heart.

We might consider that much
of what has caused the Capitalist Consumerist destruction of the natural
environment and its living breathing participants has not only been the
objectification of literally everything, but such a system furnishing
us with endless ways to avoid our own suffering, dissatisfaction and
angst, particularly with regards to the unknown that surrounds us, that
moves backwards and away into the past, and that flows open-endedly into
the future. Much of the consumerist drive is an attempt to stuff a
metaphorical hole within us with gadgets and trinkets and ideologies of
infinitude or the old myth of father-figure salvation. The castration of
meaning and of such concepts as sacred has left us with new questions
that a materialist belief system cannot meet. The most apt philosophy
for the brave new world is nihilism it seems. Perhaps though there is
something worth exploring in the relationship between a spiritual
tradition or two and the stark environmental reality in front of us? I
want to suggest that Buddhism and Animism each have some central
elements of knowing that can aid a sobering-up and a reconfiguration of
our distorted ways of perceiving and inhabiting the environmental
horizons in which we are situated.

There are sobering voices within
the global Buddhist landscape calling for radical change in our
relationships with the economy and the environment. David Loy, a
prominent American scholar and Zen Buddhist teacher, has written
numerous works identifying the madness of modern day Capitalism. His
sharpest critique finds voice in a vision of the three roots of evil
manifest collectively as ‘institutionalised greed, institutionalised ill
will, and institutionalised delusion’ and he calls for a ‘social
awakening’ in order to respond to them. There is eco-Buddhism, and the
behaviour of Southeast Asian Buddhists that wait days for ants to pass
instead of crushing them underfoot when cleaning and building,
reflecting traditional monastic morality. Although admirable and worthy,
the majority of environmentally conscious Buddhists stand in the same
landscape as the environmentalists who hope that humans will eventually
stop being so short sighted through choice alone and relinquish their
own self-obsessions, and our blind collective trudge along familiar
paths furnished by the reigning ideology of progress. Of course, this
idea is confirmed as folly each year as politicians and citizens
worldwide are all too happy to pretend the threat is way off in the
future and that it is best to carry on as usual for as long as possible
in the odd hope that nothing will ever change. It is funny how often our
own creeds are lost on us.

When sobering reality arrives, it is
rarely pleasant. A reminder that we have been sleepwalking and have
literally wasted days, months, years of our existence living poorly and
living submerged in warped delusional social practices. For some the
reaction is hatred, anger, rage, for others it is internalised, leading
to self-destruction or loss of anchors that might permit some degree of
well-being. Both reactions can result in self-harm, yet if we are really
extensions of the Earth herself, then what good does it do to cause
further pain to the elegant forgotten lady we have taken for granted?

We
like to think we are special somehow, distinct, both as individual
selves and as a species. Yet we are not. Most of our existence is
entirely unoriginal, probably all of it. Certainly the range of
thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations that make up ‘me’ or ‘you’
are recycled and reflective of mass-feeling, mass-emoting and
mass-sensing. We humans are in many ways a collective hive, or ant like,
and in the grand scheme of things, equally fragile. We are incapable of
existing apart from each other: a web of selves that build into
localised story bound colonies. Even in physical separation our thoughts
mirror a shared linguistic landscape and ideological allegiances, which
means that true isolation and aloneness are impossible in any real
sense. Images of such interrelatedness and inseparability between the
many members of a species tribe often inspire bland claims of oneness
and togetherness with resultant apathy or smugness. Although tribal
cultures have been romanticised for far too long by those with spiritual
inklings of the earthy persuasion, rather than do so, we might simply
recognise that a good number of them do live within a vision of the
world in which they are indistinct from the insect colonies with which
they co-exist unilaterally, rather than hierarchically. That it is our
failing to do the same has rendered us so dangerous and so forgetful of
our place within an organic world order of co-dependency.

As the
tide of inevitable change flows around us and through us, Buddhism and
Animism exist as paradigms that can be harnessed to accompany ever
sobering and spirited wanderers into the misty, murky future. Each has
something unique and pragmatic to offer that may give rise to new social
practices within a new social order in which we are co-participants
alongside the other animate and inanimate species. Each provides a means
for managing our existential questions and our existential practices in
order to survive as questioning, feeling, sensing creatures in a
shifting global hierarchy in which the weather becomes the leading
super-power. I like to envision them as repositories of experimental
human history and practice that can be felt and thought into, rather
than as providers of new beliefs and social practices to be conformed
to. In this sense they operate as positional realities to be explored
and learnt from and as aids to human searching and questioning.

For
it is uncertainty that scares folks most, and it is the great unknown
that terrifies, ultimately manifest in the very real demise that awaits
us in death, yet, on a more immediate level, it is woven into our
attempt to grasp at intangibles and hold tightly to whatever we value:
the adornments of our personal narratives and the small routines that we
decorate our open existence with. In a sense, we might consider the
great unknown to be a sort of universal mirror of ultimate, glaring
honesty that challenges us to swallow whole our unknowing predicament
and our finite, horizon based situatedness in embodied forms. We recoil
though, and rather like cows, we bracket the world into manageable
spaces and limit horizons into traceable terrains onto which we sketch
out our perceptions. We are generally incapable of grasping vastness,
our attention always being contextualised. Otherwise, vastness is
straight jacketed into borrowed poetic deferral to light and love by the
romantic and spiritually indulgent or to equally reassuring nihilism by
the pessimists. This in a sense explains why we are ideologically bound
creatures and why we struggle to give up our allegiance to them. Our
fear of the unknown and this need to bracket the world into manageable,
meaningful spaces is so thoroughly instinctual and unconscious.

The enlightened folk will wander as lost as others, but they
will be fully there, impregnated with the immediacy of a shared open
predicament.

Many
who come to Buddhism see meditation as being its essence. However, as
many Buddhist scholars like to point out, in most Asian countries,
meditation is, and always has been, practised by an extremely small
percentage of Buddhists, like really, almost nobody. Buddhism for the
masses has long been primarily about worship, prayer, supplication and
rituals. Although some might say that there is inherent within such
practices meditative states, and though that may well be so for some,
explicit formal meditation practice has long been the domain of the
elite: either the aristocrats and spiritual specialists in countries
such as Tibet and Japan, or of the very few in South East Asian
countries who dedicated their lives to the renunciate way of life. In
the West then we are doing something quite different from the traditions
that have gone before. Western Buddhism is already very different at a
lay level to what it has ever been. We might even argue that modern
Western Buddhism as practised by westerners is already post-traditional.
That said my post-traditional is an attempt at self-description outside
of tradition, meaning free of attempts to transpose an exotic Eastern
Buddhist form into Western society with all the mimicry and the adoption
of a Buddhist identity that goes along with it. And in spite of my
fondness for much of Glenn Wallis’ work, I have to confess to being a
Buddhist.

Post-traditional and meditation

What
would post-traditional Buddhist meditation look like? What does it look
like to deeply practice a Buddhist meditation technique outside of a
tradition? Is there any value or worth in removing Buddhist meditation
techniques from the tradition in which they have been developed and
shared, and stood the test of time? In truth, each of these questions
has already been answered and they are continuing to be answered by the
many people that stumble along with varying degrees of success, finding
their own way through books, videos, podcasts, and different degrees of
experience had within established Buddhist groups. Meditation techniques
themselves were developed by people of course, many of whom were
stepping outside of tradition, or adapting and modernising existing
traditions. Every time we place ourselves in sincere relationship with a
meditation practice, we are adapting the technique through our personal
and individual process, bringing new material into relationship with
the practice, that is say, making the practice our own. Every time you
sit down to meditate, it is a new moment, a new act. This immediacy, if
conscious, is an antidote to complacency and a challenge to prescriptive
behavioural modification that many traditional forms and approaches to
meditation practice take or condone. How far an individual will go in
this process will determine how radically they change. After all, if
Buddhism has any worth, it is this, change.

My
relationship with Buddhism is one of fluctuation, shifting in and out
of a sort of intimate embrace, going deeply into shifting possibilities,
whilst stepping back and examining with Western eyes and hands: teasing
apart delicately and testing through personal experience the human
potential within Buddhism’s human articles. Arguing over the ideological
content and agenda inherent within politicised religious formations is
one approach to take in reviewing Buddhism as a whole, especially if
serious disillusionment has settled in and the rot has begun. Another is
to deny it its supernatural claims and see it as a rich and varied
history of human endeavour, and as such, open to a very human
interpretation and reformulation, and this is the approach I like to
take here. I feel I go further than the Secular Buddhists, but not as
far as Wallis, Steingass and Pepper.

A post-traditional approach, as the British sociologist Anthony Giddens
points out, is aware of choice and the constructed nature of tradition.
Post-traditional goes beyond prescription to self-determination. If I
am not a product of tradition, if I am not an autonym that acts in
accordance with a fixed past, then I must necessarily choose how to
engage and how to act in a (hopefully) conscious relationship with
tradition/s. Post-traditional implies a degree of freedom then and
awareness about that freedom. If deference to tradition sits opposite
modern self-reflection, then a question that emerges is why do people
grasp at the seeming solidity of tradition and not embrace a more
self-aware relationship with Buddhism as the construct that it is? Well,
in part, traditions, especially of the religious persuasion, have a
nasty habit of defending themselves from progress and change.
Impermanence has long been the enemy of stability and Buddhist
institutions are no strangers to this in spite of what they preach. The
old anti-modernity pursuit of a pure past, authentic tradition, the
guarantor of expertise and so forth are the weapons raised in defence
against the uncertainty and destabilising nature of change. Of course
this friction plays out constantly at all levels of society, but,
perhaps we, as in you and I, can embrace uncertainty and recognise
Darwin’s claim that it is not the strongest that survive, but those most
able to adapt to change.

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About Me

I'm a Life Coach, Core Shamanic Counsellor and meditation teacher to boot. I also teach English in Trieste, Italy. I follow a non-traditional expression of Buddhism and also run occasional events over the border from Trieste in Slovenia on Shamanism. Email me if you're curious about any of these activities.

Benvenuti (welcome)

This blog started out as an experiment. It continues to be such to this day. The opinions you will find in these pages are my own, and like all material on this Earth, are subject to change due to that hidden factor of impermanence.

This blog started out as an experiment. Writing is an art and one which I am only now starting to develop any capacity in. All of my writing constitutes a learning process in the presentation of ideas, opinions and experience. I am no expert, but I am doing my best to develop and learn from each piece I publish.

This blog started out as an experiment. I've no idea where it will end up. I explore Buddhist and Shamanic themes in this blog. Both areas which interest a fairly small percentage of Western society. Therefore this blog is quite specialist. It goes one step further by not representing any particular tradition in either of these spiritual arenas, although I have grounding in two shamanic worlds; one a path, the other an approach to counselling. My experience of Buddhism is primarily within the Tibetan and Theravada traditions.